New on Android

You can’t create playlists, browse by genre, song or even album. All you get is one long list of music, ordered alphabetically by artist.

Tunester is all about usability. When you’re scrolling through your music, you can stop at any artist and click on their respective album to ‘expand’ it. This ‘auto-collapse’ interface is designed to make navigating a single list easier, with each song accessible in a couple of clicks.

It operates on a per-app basis – so if you know your kid could easily while away a whole evening watching YouTube clips rather than swotting up on Plato’s preachings, you can block the video-sharing app indefinitely, only re-enabling it when you yourself need to use it, or on weekends and school holidays when you’re happy to grant full uncensored access.

After becoming a runaway success on iPhone, Buy Me a Pie finally arrived for Android in August, serving up a sweet way of creating shopping lists. These lists can be shared via SMS, email or via other apps installed on a device.

It also has a cloud synchronization feature, so if you’re an iOS and Android user, you can sync lists between accounts and devices.

Nextdoor is a private social network for your neighborhood, enabling people to stay connected to what’s happening in their part of town. The release of this version came several months after the launch of its iOS app. As expected, the features are pretty much the same.

To date, the service is being used in 17,881 neighborhoods around the United States and is seeing a 10 percent penetration. Five of the top city governments have also chosen to use the service to communicate with their constituents: New York, Houston, Dallas, San Diego, and San Jose.

Dots, the ridiculously addictive mobile puzzle game that’s already taken the iOS world by storm, finally landed on Android via Google Play and the Amazon Appstore (for Kindle Fire).

For the uninitiated, the aim of the game (literally) is to connect as many of the same-colored dots as possible in a minute. And you can also compete against friends by connecting with the usual social networks.

The Android launch came a little over two months after Dots arrived for iPad, but the Android incarnation brought a new mode into the mix. It features a non-time-sensitive element, which basically means you can head off and make a cup of coffee and come back to it while you assess the best way forward.

Blipfoto allows users to share pictures to their profile but it’s considered more of a photo journal platform than straight photo-sharing, and as such users can only share one picture per day and can only upload new photographs, rather than scans or old ones.

Developed in collaboration with Google, users connect the app to their vehicle’s Bluetooth system – for those without, it’s also possible to record drives manually – and sign in with their existing Google account. SmileDrive then records everything about the trip, including the weather conditions, total miles logged and the time spent out on the road.

Mac and iOS

When you first install the Contacts+ app, it will ask to sync with your Facebook account, populating your contacts with their relevant profile pictures. You can then find your contacts using a text-based search or a dialer, which provides a predictive search of names and numbers. You can press and hold on a contact’s photo to make a call, and even prioritize your contacts by importance rather than alphabetically.

Additionally, Contacts+ creates groups automatically based on who you interact with most – though this can be manually performed. The automated smart groups feature is unique to the iPhone version.

Radical.FM launched an iOS app [US only] this month, marking the company’s first foray into native app streaming. It differentiates itself from others in the market by offering access to its 25 million song catalogue on a ‘pay what you can’ basis.

Unlike rival services like Spotify or Pandora, it uses human-curated suggestions, rather than leaving it to pure algorithms.

The feature set does try to be different, including things like ‘Custom Genres’, which allows a 30-second snippet of a track to be heard before adding it to a station. Once added to a custom station it will then play back the entire track in the selected order.

DeskConnect offers an easy way to share links, photos, documents and more between your iPhone and Mac.

The Mac app is tucked away in the Menu Bar, with a single click revealing all devices set up and registered with the same DeskConnect account. Some apps will integrate with the tool automatically; so if you have a page open in Safari or Chrome, clicking the icon will have the URL ready and waiting to share. Select the device and the webpage is immediately sent across to your mobile.

The Mac app can also be set up to share anything saved to the clipboard. Particularly useful when jotting down an address, e-mail or any other information that you’ll need later in the day. Directions from Google Maps is also supported, and DeskConnect even integrates with the Contacts app on your Mac – so you can instantly ring that number with your iPhone.

ReadQuick taps the likes of Pocket and Instapaper to display your saved articles one word at a time – at a pace set by you. It also has a built-in browser that lets you access and save directly to ReadQuick, and tells you how long each article should take to complete based on the stipulated words-per-minute rate.

So in theory, the more often you use the app, the speedier a reader you shall become. ReadQuick is available to download for $4.99 now.

Granted, at first we wondered what possible use-case there would be for this, but it could come in useful. For example, if you’re looking to watch how a pizza is made from scratch, while also learning how to chop a certain vegetable, you can.

The app allows users to easily create charts by inputting data and selecting the type of chart they’d like to use from a choice of Bars, Pie, Cloud, Scrapers and Parliament.

Once chosen, the user can then tweak the color scheme before confirming the changes and being presented with the option to either share it via a social network (Twitter, Facebook or Instagram) email it to someone, or save it as an image file (JPEG).

Windows 8, Web & cross platform

With less emphasis on the check-in side of things, mashing up its previous primary function with a way to find out about local businesses is a good way to keep it relevant in a sea of other ‘local discovery’ platforms.

The simple Web app challenges school kids to fill in the blanks in sentences about celebrities, friends and interests, hopefully making the learning process a bit more relevant to their everyday lives. A backend section allows teachers to track students’ progress.

Currently still invite-only (the mobile and Windows 8 versions have been live for a while), News360 for the Web serves as a news discovery platform that works to help surface interesting news stories based on your tastes and reading habits.

The service mixes the telephony focus of Skype, with the social approach of chat apps like WhatsApp and Line. Maaii enables calls to regular phones across the world directly from the app, and users can purchase calling credit, as they do with Skype and SIP-based services, or alternatively earn it by completing tasks such as inviting friends to join, rating the app and more.

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